Travelling to meet online people offline and taking my travel blog to the Gold Coast for Problogger

I get to travel again next week – yippee! – although it’s only a quick trip, over to the Gold Coast in Queensland, the other side of Australia, to attend the Problogger conference. I haven’t been to the Gold Coast since I was twelve and then it was an extremely quick look. I won’t have much time to look around (though fortunately I’m staying really, really close to the beach) but I will have plenty of chances to meet some other great travel bloggers and in fact all kinds of online type people who I feel like I have “known” for years but have never met in the flesh.

I won’t lie – I’m a bit nervous about that! It’s weird to get to know people online and only later, sometimes many years later, to actually meet them. But I’ve never had a bad experience. A couple of years ago Nora Dunn (The Professional Hobo) came across Australia on the train and spent a day with me in Perth – we had known each other online for some years and when we met up in person it was just like we’d always known each other. Earlier this year during a stop in Dublin I was lucky that travel writer Lola Akinmade’s schedule (heading from Stockholm to County Cork) actually had us both in Dublin on the same day and we could meet up – and it was just the same (and lovely) as when I met Nora.

Meeting up with Lola Akinmade in Dublin

There are going to be so many people I “know” at this conference. One – funny story – I actually do know – blogger Amanda from Cooker and a Looker is, as I just recently discovered, the very same Amanda who I worked with well over a decade ago in Osaka, Japan. There are also a bunch of travel bloggers attending who I know and read online but have never met – but they’ll be first cab off the rank as we are planning a travel blogger meet-up the evening before the conference actually starts. And I’m rooming with the lovely Jo of Zigazag so we will be our very own little force of WA travel bloggers.

No doubt you’ve heard me say before that one of my favourite aspects of travel is the people you meet or the people you go to visit, so heading to this conference is a great combination of going somewhere I don’t really know much about, and going to see people I really want to hang out with, plus the added bonus of listening and learning about blogging and social media and all kinds of topics I really love. I’m buzzing before I even get there – I fear my brain will explode by the time the trip is over. And I suspect I will come home full of ideas to make Not A Ballerina all kinds of better and more interesting. Watch this space!

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